$298 Wal-Mart PC Has OO.org, No Crapware 422
cristarol writes "Wal-Mart has begun selling a $298 PC (Everex IMPACT GC3502). It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and OpenOffice.org 2.2, as well as a complete lack of crapware: 'Users accustomed to being bombarded with trialware offers and seeing their would-be pristine Windows desktops littered with shortcuts to AOL and other applications will likely be pleased at their absence from the GC3502.' The machine is targeted at the back-to-school market. The hardware is nothing to write home about: a 1.5GHz Via C7 with 1GB of RAM and integrated graphics, but as Ars points out, it should be more than capable of performing basic tasks." Dell sells a low-end PC through Wal-Mart for $200 more, and one assumes it is loaded with crapware. Anybody know for sure?
One Question (Score:3, Insightful)
"Eco-friendly" computer (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess a computer that has little or nothing to it also doesn't use much power either. But then, my Game Boy is more eco-friendly.
If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't sell the students short (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, if you include MP3's, porn, FPS games and bittorrents it may not run so well, but still $289 isnt a bad price for that.
Re:Don't sell the students short (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't sell the students short (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done statistical analysis on a Zenith Data Systems 8088 system and written games for a Commodore 64, so please don't refer to anything with an 80 GB hard drive and 1 GB of RAM as "junk hardware". I know junk hardware, and that, sir, is no TRS-80.
The fact that the OS needs 1 GB of memory to function is what's wrong with the world! Seesh, kids these days...
Re:Don't sell the students short (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Don't sell the students short (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't sell the students short (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from the fact that, if you're going with Windows on this kind of hardware, a version prior to Vista would've been smarter, everything should suffice for it's intended purpose.
Problem is that Microsoft probably offers OEM's Vista for near free but charges a premium for XP, the system would have probably been more expensive if it included an older version of Windows.
Inflation of specs for student tasks (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to abuse an old cliche.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with the MS tax, can you realistically buy or assemble a full PC with those specs for that kind of price? Sounds like a good entry-level Linux box to me!
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at the features of a modern web browser and it's no surprise that it sucks up 100+ MB of ram. Same goes for a word processor that's doing full-time spell checking and reformatting large documents. Then there's the OS updates. When an update is made it's not made for last year's bottom-of-the-barrel hardware like this pc, that code is written to target today's average cpu. So patches to the OS are made to run on hardware that's faster than what yours was the day it was new.
Now consider that students go to school for a reason (I'm thinking college/university here). They have specific applications they need to run for some classes. In engineering I had to do PSpice and Matlab and whatnot. People in social work and other fields have stats programs they run. I'm sure accountants, geologists and every other field have their specific apps. These aren't tweaked to run on low-end hardware.
Finally there's the distance courses. They often include video, audio and copious PDF files. Flash player, Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader are all getting fatter with each release.
I've actually convinced myself that this computer is worse for students than I thought in the first place.
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, while I'm thinking of it, this PC might be a good buy for my parents who badlu need to upgrade their old workhorse. Those specs will run XP just fine!
Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, they usually describe this as "Groupthink"
The fact is that Slashdot users have a variety of backgrounds and opinions. On every issue, there is a distribution of opinions. On some subjects we all seem to agree (e.g. "technology is good"), on others we mostly agree (e.g. "Linux is cool") and on others still there is so much disagreement that you will see completely contradictory and opposing opinions both modded up to +5 (e.g. "global warming is a myth").
Your example, of disliking MS but supporting Wal-Mart, is a total strawman. The general impression I get is that there is a consistent but not universal dislike of Microsoft's business tactics, and that there is solid division of opinion on the Wal-Mart issue. I've seen insightful comments both supporting the good that Wal-Mart does as part of a thriving free market, and insightful comments about the harm that Wal-Mart does as a megacorp that only cares about money. Both sides make good points and the most reasonable stance is probably a nuanced view that takes into account all of these factors. To suggest that Slashdot has a single opinion on these subjects betrays a serious lack of perspective on your part.
Your closing sentence, "I wish I lived in the fantasy world of most Slashdotters", again is deeply rooted in the fantasy that Slashdot is a single entity with a single mind, and that any self-contradictory statements it makes represent its own insanity, rather than diversity of opinion among its constituents.
Where to start. (Score:5, Insightful)
The machine has 1Gb RAM. My laptop has a quarter of that and seems to browse the web and run Office perfectly well.
As for CPU... I'm pretty sure it will cope with the heaviest of messenger sessions.
I've actually convinced myself that this computer is worse for students than I thought in the first place.
You need to climb down back to the real world. Very few people need garanteed sub-millisecond response times (or even knows what they are).
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:5, Insightful)
All this stuff runs just fine even on 512M of RAM. I use one such machine for work, which includes most of the stuff you listed (word processing, web browsing, matlab, lots of compiling, lots of PDF, image editing, etc.), and it runs just fine even with dual monitors.
Let's not even go into the "uphill both ways" stories of what computing power we used in college to do these exact same things.
I think the GP is right, the kids will whine because they can't play games. Been there, done that
I'll take the crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to a PC that runs at over 100 W, it probably doesn't matter too much, but if your PC uses about 20 W, it matters if your monitor uses 1 W or 20 W.
Re:"Eco-friendly" computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Driving a Hummer once per year --> terrorist.
Driving a Prius 100 miles each weekend to bounce between parties --> eco-friendly.
Lighting up a tiny studio apartment with incandescent bulbs --> terrorist.
Lighting up a mansion full of empty rooms with CFLs --> eco-friendly.
Running non-eco-friendly computer 8 hrs per day --> terrorist.
Running eco-friendly computer non-stop --> eco-friendly.
Suggesting alternate method to contain global warming that requires little effort from most people --> terrorist.
Requiring everyone to adhere to a set of rules banning devices deemed inefficient --> eco-friendly.
Glad I could clear that up.
It's all good (Score:5, Insightful)
And yeah, Wal-Mart probably isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor to boost open source, nor to satisfy the few Linux people. Their motivation is undoubtedly to make money, and they usually do that by giving consumers what they want (a cheap item, that does the job).
Well, we should be proud that OpenOffice is seen as a viable enough too in their delivery of such a product, especially one aimed at students. It really is a big step in the right direction, and validates Open Source to a very large degree.
-dale
Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, if the choice is between a student having this $300 computer, and a student having no computer, which do you think is better?
Not every parent can afford to spend $1000 or even $500.
Yes they are. Any app designed for business is tweaked to run on a variety of systems, programs are designed to run on systems that were state-of-the-art more than five years prior. The business upgrade cycle used to be around three years, but now it's getting larger every day -- and businesses tend not to buy top-of-the-line systems anyway.
Back to educational use -- very few disciplines of study require apps that really use a lot of cycles. And when they do, typically those apps are run on university computers, not students' PCs. Those apps are also typically used for high-level research, not basic undergrad stuff.
Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks (Score:3, Insightful)
Other than that, I agree -- most non-gamers would be fine with it.
Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks (Score:3, Insightful)
How would stores shift the mid- and high-end PCs, given that most people don't play modern 3D games, if they didn't inflate the specs required to perform more common tasks?
I've even seen stores recommending at least a mid-end PC if you want to surf the web. Presumably the low-end ones aren't powerful enough to run a web browser...
Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where to start. (Score:2, Insightful)
The software that we used in school isn't available any more. I can't get Becky any more (oops - looks like I can [rimarts.co.jp]). Netscape 2.0 isn't going to cut it. Wordperfect 5 for DOS was great on memory use but I just can't use it any more.
Students need hardware just like everyone else. A decent CPU, a couple gigs of RAM (if you want the computer to last until the end of the year), that's the foundation. This box has neither but does come with a resource-hungry OS.
Re:Minimal crapware.. (Score:4, Insightful)
They could have chosen a free AV package, like they chose a free office suite
Even more, with the Norton stuff installed that 1.5ghz via cpu will feel like a 800mhz one and with constant hdd scratching it will feel like it swaps all the time. There are dozens of - even free - av sw that are at least as good and need much less resources - which is point to consider given there's only 1gb of memory and vista on it. I just made a 750mhz duron machine usable again last week by replacing that norton 2k7 stuff, they just wondered how could that be...
Re:Where to start. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where to start. (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone who has made a negative comment so far has gone quickly to -1 land, but I had to put in my two cents worth. Doesn't it say in the guide to moderation that if you disagree, don't mod down, respond?
Re:Nice home Linux server box (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone have links to real world benchmark information (not performance per Watt, raw application performance)?
This would make a nice Linux server.. my only hesitation is raw power for the few CPU intensive tasks my server performs. For example, MythTV commercial flagging. With my 1.6GHz Athlon64, it does commflagging quite well. I'm wondering if going to a C7 would slow that down a lot.
Also, this box could possibly be an interesting Myth frontend. The integrated GPU has an MPEG2 accelerator function, which (when everything is working well) can make decoding HD video very low overhead. But, there are several issues that would probably get in the way
- Driver support. The OpenChrome project is a bit iffy.. They may not support this new chipset, and may not have full functionality if they do.
- XvMC VLD support - If it does work, the XvMC API is not always reliable.
- HD support -- depending on the chipset, it may or may not support HD resolutions. Many VIA GPUs are limited to 1024x1024, which makes them fairly useless.
Re:Where to start. (Score:3, Insightful)
2. At $300, they can probably afford to buy an OEM copy of Windows XP to downgrade the OS to something that doesn't suck on the hardware, and then, effectively, throw the machine in the trash at the end of the year to buy a new one in the fall.
Granted, a gig-and-a-half Via processor isn't any too beefy for a new computer, but it's not that much less powerful that the five-year-old Athlon XP I use at home (under Win 2k, though). And it's undoubtedly more powerful than the 166Mhz Pentium (with MMX! and 48MB of RAM!) I was issued as a freshman almost ten years ago, and the 700Mhz desktop Athlon I had the last year I was a college student. Ultimately, the issue you seem to be missing isn't that don't need computers, it's that your average schmoe still doesn't need much of a computer for 80-100% of what they're doing with it.
What I'm getting at is that not everybody is/was a compsci or engineering student (or does 3D modeling, or whatever).
Low end for education (Score:2, Insightful)
Regarding education, it might be OK for the basic stuff but innovative teachers are going far beyond the basic word processing/web browsing thin client type stuff nowadays. I'm training a group of new teachers right now on iLife. In a fifth grade class, students can write, cast, direct, film, edit, and publish a movie on a topic they're studying to their own website on a school web server using iLife. They can compose their own soundtrack using GarageBand. They can make a podcast about the movie and put it on their website. They can take pictures of the process and make it a slideshow and publish THAT on their site. All easily possible because of iLife and the fact that today's Intel Macs have the CPU power to do all this stuff. You're not doing any of that on a cheapo PC. When kids make stuff, they learn more than just reading dry old textbooks. It's called constructivist learning. At the secondary level, the projects can and do get more in depth.
So if I'm a fifth grade teacher, I don't want one of these crap boxes. You can buy three crap boxes for the price of one iMac, but I'd rather have the iMac.
Too bad (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"Eco-friendly" computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Posting something that makes it seem like you're "thinking outside of the box", when you're really just attacking arguments no one made --> karma.
Re:Where to start. (Score:3, Insightful)
I did my EE senior project (in 1984) on an Atari 800 with 48k of RAM (took 3 cards to hold all those memory chips!) and a floppy disk drive that wrote 88k per disk (unless you used the "hole punch trick", in which case it was a "flippy" and could hold 176k :-).
For the project, I designed and built a processor from discrete TTL gates (!), and used the Atari to write its operating system as well as a processor simulator to debug it. All this in Atari 8k BASIC.
And I got an A, too. :-) :-)
Better yet, as a cooperative education student with NASA, I was actually paid to write a general aviation flight simulator cockpit on the Atari (in raw assembler), and was flown to Oshkosh to present it at the Experimental Aircraft Association convention. I still remember the Apple II and Commodore 64 fans who were determined to argue that their computers were better for flying an airplane than an Atari.
Crazy kids, we were. But I've never understood every bit in every register in any computer since then.
Re:Funny (Score:2, Insightful)
Grrr... I just wanted to make a flippant comment for a "funny mod" and now you've engaged me...
I do not support Microsoft's business actions-- past, present, and probably future. But the last line of your post actually made me laugh; you think with an open-source platform and applications, people will spend less time "mucking" with their machines? Really? I'm not going to spout anecdotal evidence that I have to the contrary, but I think even the most rabid zealots would agree that by its very nature, OSS requires much more mucking than a closed platform.
I actually agree with the OP sentiment that if F/OSS wants even a fighting chance at gaining market share (beyond Firefox, and maybe OO.org), they need a marketing department, and a damned good one. I think that the distros and some of the applications have come a really long way in terms of user-friendliness and general aesthetic appeal, but I also think they've got a long way to go. Foremost, stop giving your software these goofy-shit names that no one will ever take seriously. Second, try something truly innovative, instead of using the guise of user-familiarity to copy what Microsoft "blatantly ripped off" of Apple, who "creative acquired" off of [etc. etc.]. Third and perhaps most important, stop demonizing everyone who doesn't wave your flag; closed software is not the Great Satan, it does not conspire to eat your babies in the night, and it doesn't hate freedom. For a movement that's all about choice, there certainly seems to be an intolerance of anyone who chooses the "wrong" choice.
/end rant
//damn these slashies are addictive